Halfway to a Miracle
February 11th 2024
Halfway to a Miracle is a songwriting project I did in January of 2024. The conceit is to write a "song" every day of the month - as such, this album has 31 half-songs, mostly these bizzare, half formed acoustic guitar sketches. It didn't matter how long the song was, as long as I got something recorded
As in the Bandcamp description, I "stole" the idea from Michelle Zauner from Japanse Breakfast. Visual artists often do similar things where they'll do a sketch or small drawing every day for a month. There was something really evocative about the concept - I had just finished and released I Saw... which had me hunched over working on these songs for 9, 12, some even 15 months, so the idea of having a day, or realistically an hour or two at most to finish a song sounded fantastic
It was easy at the start. I hadn't done alot of writing prior to January, I was in bands in real life which was fresh and new and I was enjoying playing music with real musicians instead of myself, though the first third or so of the album is pretty rough. Things picked upa bit at day 9 or 10 and generally stayed pretty good from there, when I had time to write a song, anyway.
A good number of the songs were embryonic ideas from my "song ideas" note file on my phone, which is just a long list of evocative words or phrases or whatever that I think could be cool in a song. The process often involved just sitting and playing different notes or riffs on the guitar until I found a good one,then tried finding something from the notes list that matched the feeling of the riff or chords
A few of the songs are really, really good, or at least have the potential to be really really good. Doing the project kind of planted the idea of making a "singy song" album in my head; as in an album where the strength of the words and chords and the capital S SONG was the selling point, rather than the production and set dressing - again, in repsonse to I Saw....